r/artificial • u/ControlCAD • 1d ago
News Google DeepMind says four AI agents beat Minecraft in 27 hours by writing 2,783 programs of their own — AI team died 605 times on Easy difficulty and ran up an estimated $520 in tokens
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/google-deepmind-claims-four-gemini-4-agents-beat-minecraft-in-27-hours-by-writing-2-783-programs-of-their-own-the-ai-team-died-605-times-on-easy-difficulty-and-ran-up-an-estimated-usd520-in-tokens64
u/Neat_Tangelo5339 1d ago
Why are making bots play videogames ,
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u/Ivan8-ForgotPassword 1d ago
Videogames are a good objective benchmark that somebody else already made.
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u/detailteufel 1d ago
They really aren't exactly because the AI training data is full of Minecraft tutorials and guides.
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u/Ivan8-ForgotPassword 1d ago
Do want them to figure out Minecraft from first principles with no info at all like that Japenese guy? Most humans probably would not be able to do that by themselves. Plus the tutorials are on minecraft mechanics, I imagine there are rather few tutorials on writing 2783 programs to beat the game.
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u/VayneSquishy 1d ago
If this was the case and say you’re right. Why didn’t the ai complete Minecraft with 0 issues? There in lies the problem. Theoretically they should know everything right? Well putting it to practical use is actually difficult. It’s like asking ai ‘make me money’. Make you money how? Video games are an easy objective metric to see how an ai applies its actual problem solving in the real world. It’s a simulation for all intents and purposes.
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u/detailteufel 1d ago
A lot of the interaction between AI and apps right now is via Screenshots, it's not exactly perfect and our current AI are still just LLMs, they need to custom make tools for a ton of scenes to be able to control the game, which is exactly what happened here.
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u/nothingNowhereForNow 1d ago
Video games are an easy objective metric to see how an ai applies its actual problem solving in the real world
Ah yes, video games, the real world. Yes.
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u/Horror_Response_1991 1d ago
To gather data to make bots better at video games, once they can master dynamic games they can master things in the real world without “dying” 605 times.
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u/AndrewH73333 8h ago
Do people not understand video games have a wide variety of problem solving involved? You’d think people who play them all day would know that.
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u/Big_Bar_9832 1d ago
AI is good at something that has a firmly defined outcome. Video games have firmly defined outcomes. There is a way to beat Minecraft, it just needs to assemble a solution to complete the game, it's literally a perfect use case. That's all reinforcement learning is anyways, constructing an environment with a rigid definition of the expected outcome. The interesting part is when the AI finds different outcomes that satisfy your request that isn't what was intended, that's why you hear stuff like "oh no ai broke out of containment" except it's sensationalized in the news.
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u/Juskyrat 1d ago
Because I suppose the water is free, up until it's used for human consumption then it's a $5 for a 32oz bottle.
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u/davidmirkin 1d ago
Easily translates to controlling robots
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u/Neat_Tangelo5339 1d ago
Sounds more like a marketing scheme to me
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u/davidmirkin 1d ago
Yeah, it’s both
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u/Neat_Tangelo5339 1d ago
Its like the third one of this type of dimostrations they made , where are the servitor robots folks ?
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u/Jazzlike-External-32 1d ago
The number that actually matters in this story is $520. Writing 2,783 programs and dying 605 times to beat a game on Easy is a neat demo, but it is also a reminder that these agents still solve hard tasks by brute force: infinite retries, infinite budget, and a world where dying has no cost. The real world gives you none of those.
The benchmark question is not whether an agent can eventually solve a task. It is how much compute and how many attempts it took to get there. $520 in tokens to beat Minecraft is the honest version of a progress chart. Until that cost curve bends down hard, agents stay in the demo phase for anything where a mistake has a price tag.
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u/schwah 1d ago
Solving a problem is the first step, optimizing and making it cheaper comes naturally over time. It cost IBM over $2m to develop Deep Blue (the first chess agent that beat a world champion). Now you can run a 3600+ elo agent on your cell phone.
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u/ConnyTheOni 1d ago
Yeah I mean to me, 500 bucks for agents pulling off all that work is pretty incredible imho. When you consider just a decade ago Google probably spent upwards of a billion dollars just to get to alphago. I wonder how much it would cost today to do the same amount of training for alphago. Just the fact someone could probably do a comparable effort at home now is mind blowing.
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u/Fadamaka 17h ago
For that comparison you would need to factor in the billions that went into the training of the models beating minecraft. You are comparing the running cost of a test to the training cost of a model. To get to current LLM capabilities you need to add up all the training of all the AI labs because they steal/learn for each other, compete with each other. If you do that you are scraping the upwards cost of 300 billion.
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u/Itsmedudeman 21h ago
The interesting thing to me is that nobody is trying to train these AI to be good at any particular video game but they just naturally get better with more general training. So as each update happens there will eventually come a time where this is cheap even though nobody asked for it.
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u/NeighborhoodDizzy990 10h ago
How can you optimize a treatment for cancer, for example? Apart from killing innocent people?
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u/AttitudeRemarkable21 1d ago
Idk if i would call that brute force . I mean that's how I feel on my math exams
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u/AndrewH73333 8h ago
What till you hear about evolution and its brute force/trial and error problem solving. But I guess that never really lead to anything useful either.
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u/thegreenfarend 1d ago
This is still mind blowing progress to me!
I graduated a few years ago, and studied a lot of data science. You could’ve given me a million dollars and still couldn’t have accomplished this with state of the art at the time.
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u/Fadamaka 17h ago
Really good point. The big $1 million math bounty is also a good case to get an idea of price and volume of the work the agents are doing. Approx they spent $10-20 million on tokens and GPT-6 ran for 88,000 hours. This is 88,000 hours of pure focused work, no breaks, nothing. So if you want to compare it to a regular human you need to factor in breaks. Let's say a good human worker can do 5 hours of focused work on each work day. Let's go with the regular 5 days a week and 4 weeks a month, 12 month a year work years. That is 1,200 hours of work per year. So a single human would have needed to spend 73 years of their life working to get to the same amount of effort.
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u/Ok_Nectarine_4445 1d ago
Shows areas where it is weak. It isn't looking at things 60fps like we are. Has to take stop, take screenshot and analyze it. Has to use various tools to see the interface and screen information and tools to input into the game. They process all at once, discretely, not continuously like humans and current and future uses of long running agents, uses of interfaces and maybe future robotics gives insights where there can be improvements made for native weaknesses in LLMs.
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u/onedev2 1d ago
The argument that human perception is continuous is up for debate. How the information gets to the processing unit (AI or human brain) is irrelevant
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u/Ok_Nectarine_4445 1d ago
Human brain functioning is pretty continuous I would say with constant internal activation waves, even if your nose and ears and eyes were closed off and in a floating isolation tank. Even when sleeping and "unconscious" there are constant activation waves of different kinds.
So, not sure what you are saying.
We don't directly experience outside reality, it is all converted into electrical impulses and we experience a recreation in the brain of it, if that is what you are getting at.
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u/Moral-Relativity 1d ago
Most immediate revenue generating application I can think of would be to farm gold in more human-like and less detectable ways like for WoW, or go through repetitive grind common to many MMOs on player's behalf, if token cost can be economized.
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u/AIGODSEND 9h ago
605 deaths on easy difficulty is the most honest number in the post. that's a verifier running in a cheap, reversible environment — die, roll back, rewrite the program. the capability is real, but what transfers isn't the 2,783 programs, it's the loop: generate, execute, observe failure, restore state.
the open question is what happens when a death isn't reversible. a deleted table, a sent email, a paid invoice. then those 605 failures have to be caught before execution, not after, and the loop gets much more expensive. most agent demos skip that part because it's unglamorous. the ones that publish kill rates are the ones people will trust with tools.
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u/espenakker 8h ago
Hmm, did they in practice make a minecraft bot or are these just a bunch of manually called scripts
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u/buzzyloo 1d ago
I had no idea you could beat Minecraft. I thought it was just an immersive world with neverending things to do, like an MMO
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u/JinpaLhawang 1d ago
Yeah but what did it think of the dialogue that's displayed after beating the game? Side note: I had a good discussion with Fable about Vajrayana Buddhism once. I should do that again...
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u/ElegantApartment1325 1d ago
the best part is that half the run was just fighting the dragon and the winning move was stacking dirt to reach the crystals. 2,783 programs to reinvent what every minecraft kid figures out in an afternoon lol
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u/Objective-Salad-7598 23h ago
Meanwhile, you can pay Chinese players just a few hundred yuan to do it for you.
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u/mitchare 1d ago
605 deaths on Easy difficulty is a hell of a learning curve. reminds me of watching new vet students try to place their first IV catheter. messy, expensive, but they get there. the $520 in tokens stings though. that's one pricey speedrun
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u/AllGearedUp 1d ago
I don't know much about the game but I didn't know you could beat it. I thought it was a sandbox for building.